You might remember Diana Rose Harper from her first piece, Digital Covencrafting for POC Mystics. Creating real and conceptual homes is as important to her as it is for us and she’s offering a monthly musing on what home means to her, to people, and to the world. Expect to see anecdotes, words of wisdom, and tidbits of witchy knowledge peppered throughout.
I hope you survive and that you will know that it wasn’t your fault. I hope that you will allow yourself to survive and repair yourself, because I cannot keep you under my roof forever, and you wouldn’t want that anyway. But I hope that you know that you can always come back.
- Mothernism, “Mother of Reparations,” Lise Halle Baggesen
Home can sometimes feel like blind luck, a boon some folks get and other folks don’t. Home is to feel held, to feel loved, to feel cared for. Home is structure enough to be soft, safety enough to relax, softness enough to exist, beingness enough to expand. A nest, a womb, a blanket fort.
But Home is often fugitive, a thing aspired to and chased and never quite achieved.
Last month, I wrote around making the heart a home, the centeredness that can come with inner foundations. Since then, there have been atrocities at the U.S./Mexico border. Those atrocities highlight how much of a privilege it can be to think in terms of both inner and outer homemaking; none of my itchy moves have been required for my & my family’s survival, for basic safety.
It’s highlighting how much Home is also gratitude and the space to take for granted that which others so desperately need.
As the Sun moves through Cancer, both the softness and the structure of Home is highlighted. The sign of the Crab uses a hard shell to keep safe the tenderness within, but what happens when instead of growing with age, like a normal arthropod, the shell gets smaller, the space within shrinking? How much tenderness is possible when the shell thickens and calcifies, when the claws snap shut first and ask questions later, when everything outside of the nest becomes an enemy?
Used skillfully, compassionately, Cancer is protection for softness. It is boundaries enough to love generously. It is careful expansion so that more are held, not less. It is defense against true harm, including the very real harm caused by fear-mongering.
In honesty, I am struggling to know what to do and how to help given the horrors at the border. Elizabeth Warren’s Facebook post haunts me. How can protests and donations to the right organizations and voting in better officials heal the deep traumas being inflicted? How do you heal a mother’s heart cracked open by this kind of separation? How do you heal a child who has experienced a living hell darker than most Americans will ever know? How do you give someone not just a home, but Home, that feeling of safety, that magic of being, when Home has been taken and taken and taken?
I remind myself that those questions are too big for one person, too big to be asked and answered well now. First, we have to stop the machine, tossing whatever grains of sand and whatever boulders we can into its cogs. While we do that, while the asylum-seekers and their children linger in cruel purgatory at the border, we can also do what we can to build Home, in small ways and large, for them, for us, for us all together.
A small spell, to be done with incense or a candle and with copious intention.
May each tear shed in heartbreak water the garden of expanded community.
May each rage felt transform into fuel for the hearts of the imprisoned.
May every instance of resistance erode the walls of oppression.
May every dollar donated multiply a thousand thousandfold.
May every moment of compassion overcome hate.
May there be home enough for everyone.
Resources
To donate:
Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project
To volunteer remotely as a non-Spanish translator for mothers who speak indigenous languages (i.e. Zapotec, Nahua, Ma’am, Quich’e, Maya, Mixe, Mixteco, etc.) email volunteer@raicestexas.org
And a list of other volunteering ideas from Together Rising.
One last quote for the road:
And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone to the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?
- The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
Interested in learning more about Diana? Find her on Instagram at @ddamascenaa and on her website at ddamascenaa.com. Look out for more of her writing next month.
